For just a moment, a sense of the impossible froze his mind, but then the missile origins registered. They were coming from those damned "clusters"!

"We've been suckered, Bernie!" he snapped into his com. "Roll your ships! Those are modern missiles!"

"Second missile launch detected," Yountz chanted. Brilliant lights flared in Alvarez's and Courvosier's plots. "Second launch interception in four-seven seconds—mark!"

Alvarez whipped his ship up on her side relative to the incoming fire, and Yanakov's order to the rest of his command came while Courvosier was still speaking. But his lead destroyers were two light-seconds from his flagship, and it took time. Time to pass the word. Time for stunned captains to wrench their attention from the Masadan warships clearly visible before them. Time to pass their own orders and for their helmsmen to obey.

Time too many Graysons no longer had.

The destroyers Ararat and Judah vanished in savage flashes. They were the flankers, closest to the incoming fire. It reached them thirteen seconds sooner than it did Madrigal, and they never had a chance. They'd barely begun to roll their wedges up to interdict when the incoming missiles detonated, and they carried laser heads—clusters of bomb-pumped X-ray lasers that didn't need the direct hits Grayson missiles required. They had a stand-off range of over twenty thousand kilometers, and every primitive point defense system aboard the destroyers had been trained in the wrong direction.

Just as Madrigal's were.

Stunned Manticoran brains raced to keep up with their computers as their weapons went into action without them. Madrigal's people were only human, but her cybernetic reflexes—and a quite inordinate amount of pure luck—saved her from destruction in that first volley. Nine missiles tore down on her, but counter missiles went out at almost a thousand KPS? and point defense lasers tracked and slewed with calm technological haste. A dozen X-ray lasers lashed harmlessly at her impenetrable belly band, yet the two laser heads which might have pierced her sidewalls were picked off just short of detonation.

But simply surviving wasn't enough, and Courvosier cursed with silent ferocity. Their attackers had to be in those "clusters," and in order to hide, they'd had to shut down their own impellers and sidewalls. That meant they were not only immobile targets but buck naked to any return fire. Yet, small as the clusters might be on a solar system's scale, they were far too vast to cover with area fire. Madrigal needed a target, and she didn't have one.

"Point defense to task force coverage!" he snapped to Alvarez.

"Make it so, Tactical!" The commander listened to Yountz's acknowledgment and watched her punch the command into her console, then said, almost conversationally, "That's going to leave us mighty weak ourselves, Sir."

"Can't be helped." Courvosier never looked up from his display. "Whoever's shooting at us can't have time for more than one or two broadsides each at this velocity. If we can get the Graysons through them—"

"Understood, Sir," Alvarez said, then wheeled back to Yountz. "Can you get me any kind of target?" he demanded harshly.

"We can't even find them, Skipper!" The tac officer sounded more frustrated than afraid ... but the fear would come, whether it showed or not, Courvosier thought. "They must be inside that crap, but my radar's bouncing right back in my face. That's got to be some kind of reflectors, and—" She broke off for a moment, and her voice went flat. "Now something's jamming hell out of me, too, Skip. There's no way I can localize."

Alvarez swore, but Courvosier made himself ignore the commander and his tactical officer and stared at his own display. The Grayson destroyer David streamed a tangled blood-trail of atmosphere, but she was still there, and she was up on her side, showing only the impenetrable belly of her impeller wedge to the second broadside already rushing down upon them.

Her sister Saul looked untouched on the far side of the formation, but both light cruisers had been hit. Covington held her course, trailing air but with little other sign of damage, while her crude point defense lasers continued firing after missiles which had already passed. She didn't have a prayer of hitting them, and it wouldn't have mattered if she had, yet the volume of her fire indicated she couldn't be too badly hurt.

Austin Grayson was another story. Debris and atmosphere trailed in her wake, and she wasn't under complete control. She'd completed her roll but was still rolling, as if she'd lost her helm, and her impeller wedge fluctuated as Courvosier watched.

"Bernie?" There was no reply. "Bernie!" Still nothing.

"Second salvo impact on David in seventeen seconds," Yountz snapped, but Courvosier hardly heard her.

"What's the status of the Flag, Tactical?" he demanded harshly.

"She's been hit several times, Sir." Ensign Jackson's voice quivered, but her answer came promptly. "I can't tell how badly, but she took at least one in her after impellers. Her accel's down to four-two-one gees and falling."

Courvosier nodded and his mind raced even as Madrigal's counter missiles went out once more. This time her human personnel knew what was happening as well as her computers did; that should have made her fire even more effective, but she was spread thinner, trying to protect her consorts as well as herself. There were almost as many missiles in this salvo—with fewer targets to spread themselves among—and whoever had planned their targeting clearly knew what Madrigal was. The missile pattern was obviously a classic double broadside from something fairly powerful—probably a light cruiser—and he'd allocated six of the birds in his second launch to Madrigal. Whether it was an all-out bid for a kill or only an effort to drive her anti-missile systems back into self-defense was immaterial.

All of that flickered at the back of Courvosier's mind, yet he couldn't tear his eyes from Austin Grayson's silent light code. Then—

"Raoul?" Yanakov's voice was twisted and breathless, and Courvosier bit his lip. There was no visual, but that breathless quality told him his friend was hurt—hurt badly—and there was nothing at all he could do for him.

"Yes, Bernie?"

Even as Courvosier replied, two missiles slashed in on the damaged David. The destroyer's outclassed defenses nailed one of them; the other popped up to cross her starboard quarter at less than five hundred kilometers. The sides of her impeller wedge were protected by the focused grav fields of her sidewalls—far more vulnerable than the wedge's "roof" and "floor," but powerful enough to blunt the heaviest energy weapon at anything above pointblank range. But this was pointblank for the laser head ... and Grayson sidewalls were weak by modern standards.

A half-dozen beams ripped at David's sidewall. It bent and degraded them as it clawed at their photons, and the radiation shielding inside the wedge blunted them a bit more, but not enough.

Three of them got through, and the destroyer belched air. Her impeller wedge flashed—then died as the ship broke almost squarely in half. Her forward section vanished in an eye-tearing glare as her fusion plant's mag bottle went, and her frantically accelerating sisters left the madly spinning derelict of her after hull—and any survivors who might still cling to life within it—astern as they raced for salvation.

No less than four missiles attacked Saul, yet once again, David's sister ship emerged miraculously untouched. Her crude counter missiles were useless, but this time her gunners were ready. Primitive as their fire control was, they nailed two of her attackers; Madrigal got a third, and the single laser head they missed wasted itself harmlessly against her upper impeller band.